Verizon announces the Motorola Droid Ultra, Droid Maxx and Droid Mini

Verizon held a press event today in New York City to announce three new additions to its popular Droid line of Android handsets. The trio include the Motorola Droid Ultra, the Droid Maxx and the Droid Mini. They are a diverse group of handsets that’ll cater to the first-time smartphone buyer, the high-end phone fan and those in between. You can view the details on each handset below.

The Motorola Droid Ultra will be powerful, but thin, while the Droid Maxx will be an refresh of the Razr line with super-duper battery life. The Mini will be the entry-level model in the lineup, and will be “compact without compromise,” say Verizon Wireless. The Droid Ultra will check in with a 5-inch display, a 10-megapixel camera, a thin 7.18mm profile (the thinnest Droid yet) and a Kevlar patterned back. The Droid Maxx is functionally the same phone as the Ultra. It sports a Kevlar unibody design and an expected battery life of 48 hours with its 3500mAh battery. This extended battery beefs up the size of the handset to 8.5mm. The Mini drops the large display and rocks a smaller 4.3-inch screen.

All three handsets will be powered by a new SoC from Motorola called the X8 Mobile Computing System with 8 cores, including two app processors, four graphics processors, a contextual computing processor, and a natural language processor. The CPU is clocked at 1.7 GHz and the handset ship with 2GB of RAM. Verizon and Motorola claim this new hardware will deliver a “24 percent faster CPU, 100 percent faster GPU [and] twice the RAM.”

The phones ship with a flavor of Android that includes advanced voice commands, a Quick Capture camera option, touchless control a la Samsung and Droid Zap, which lets you share photos or videos to anyone within 300 feet of you using a simple swiping gesture. The handsets will also ship with Ingress pre-installed.

Droid preorders start today at DroidDoes.com, and the phones will be available on Aug. 20. Pricing comes in at an affordable $99 for the Mini, $199 for the Ultra and $299 for the Maxx $299. Those prices require a new two-year customer agreement.